Join us at the James River Green Building Council luncheon on Tuesday, July 9th 12:00 — 1:00pm to learn about ways to think more about the total environmental impact of products!
Posts Tagged With: environment
Science Talk: Tropical Forests and Climate Change
Join us tomorrow night, June 12, 7:30 PM, at BLACK MARKET MOTO SALOON in charlottesville to hear all about the science of rain forests, part of Science Strait Up.
Description from Science Strait Up: “How are tropical forests and climate change linked? U.Va. Environmental Sciences professor Deborah Lawrence discusses the long history of forest clearing and how it has affected the earth’s atmosphere over the past 8,000 years. Forests are important for taking up carbon, but growth and productivity limit how much they can hold. Come learn about the science behind tropical forests, carbon, and our atmosphere, and why it matters.”
Charlottesville Lunch Today: Learn About Building Resiliently
Don’t forget to join us today at the James River Green Building Council luncheon on Tuesday, June 11th 12:00 — 1:00pm to learn about how to make our built environments more resilient!
Green Building Material? Cross Laminated Timber
Here’s the idea, glue a bunch of small pieces of wood together from quickly growing trees and make yourself a massive chunk of wood. Make these chunks in to massive panels and design them so that they can be easily joined together in the field and super strong by alternating the direction of the grain. It sounds a lot like plywood on steroids. This may seem against the tree-hugger in you, as well as going against the first R rule: Reduce. Actually this is a green technology, here’s why:
First of all, think about the building itself. Mass in a building helps to regulate the temperature of a building, much like a battery (or more technically accurate, a capacitor) it slowly gains heat from its surroundings and slowly releases it. Plenty of people have written about this already: Greenpassivesolar.com is just one. When you have massive walls you need less insulation to have the same effect. Bingo, less fiberglass or foams off-gassing into the building. Panels also take less time to put together in the field, so you spend less time with no roof and waste less material on the jobsite.
Second, think about the environment: Trees are some of the best carbon sequester-ers (I know that’s not a word) on the planet. By building something out of wood, one effectively stores that carbon. This principal is a green one only if the trees used are fast growing (rapidly renewable) and responsibly harvested. The building must also be built to be useful for a very long time.
Categories: Design, Materials, Preservation
Tags: environment, Lumber, Materials and Supplies, Passive solar building design, Renewable, Tree
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Design Tool: 2030 Palette
Architecture 2030 is a team of non-profit crusaders that want to radically transform the way that structures are built and how they interact with the environment. The 2030 Challenge is much like the EPA’s very successful CFC reduction program that let the Ozone Hole repair itself. Instead of CFCs, this challenge is to phase out the use of fossil fuels in buildings by the year 2030.
Not to leave everyone hanging wondering how to accomplish this goal; they are developing a great free resource of information on how to build carbon neutral and resilient structures and plan resilient communities which is called the 2030 Palette. The website is complete with pictures, descriptions and rules of thumb for many concepts vital to low impact built environments. Check out this fantastic tool for Architects, Engineers, Owners and people who want to learn more about how our buildings interact with the environment.
Resilient Architecture
Resilience: The ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy. That’s what the dictionary says. More importantly though, as climate begins to change and the natural world bombards us with more and more challenges, how will we design our living systems to take these new challenges in stride? Resiliency and Sustainability are two terms we have begun to hear very often especially in building circles, but resiliency often gets replaced with redundancy. Resilience.org has a lot to say about the topic, so I’ll let them be your guide:
Toward Resilient Architectures I: Biology Lessons
Categories: Architecture, Design, Technology
Tags: Climate Change, Energy, environment, Living systems, Resilience, Sustainability
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Archangel Ancient Tree Archive
Imagine if the great trees of the East Coast had not been completely cut down in the name of profit and westward expansion? What if there were trees over one thousand years old all around us? What if we could help reverse what has happened to our great forests?
Archangel Ancient Tree Archive‘s mission is to preserve what’s left of the world’s ancient forests by planting baby versions of the remaining magnificent trees all around the world. These trees are the most resilient living things on the planet, so they will help to reverse deforestation at the same.
A Physical “Housing Lab”
There are varying degrees of low impact living. Every person has a different idea of what comfort is and what she can live without. What if there was a community where you could try out varying levels of low impact living in order to decide which was right for you? What if this community also had a shared building with a workshop, gathering space, laundry, and guestrooms for family or residents on the journey to intentional, low impact living? Check out this concept for a physical Housing Lab
Categories: Communities, Design
Tags: architecture, common area, common house, community, environment, intentional, journey, low impact, off the grid
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The Housing Lab 